In the current state of information technology, reading and obtaining said information and contents is achieved by means of elements such as sites, Internet portals, web pages, menus (which can be more or less dynamic), links, time routines based on the coordinates of a pointer (a technique known as “overmouse” by which different messages appear depending on the spot at which the mouse click is pointed), banners (or publicity elements which can also serve as links to the advertised element), pop-ups (or activation of new contents, windows, Internet micro-sites, etc.)
The information is shown on web pages in text and/or graphical format, occasionally including audiovisual means and use of memory.
In order to read, select, browse and access the information and its contents, links are used which join a key text or image with the access node for the corresponding information. Said links may be associated to different elements and be in different formats: text (letters, words or phrases) which are indicative of the information they refer to, icons, images, ordered in a menu format, presented with individual headings . . .
In this way, navigation is currently based on text or linear environments, which are generally not intuitive or visual.
In addition, the combined effect of the number of mouse clicks necessary to search for and access the desired information and the technology installed by the user (with a limited download speed), makes searching for and accessing the desired information difficult, as current systems of uni-dimensional categorisation are insufficient, demand an additional reading effort, produce an environment that is tiring for the user and limits the possibilities of marketing and promotion of the advertised brand in an Internet site.
Worthy of note among the background of the present invention is document U.S. Pat. No. 5,966,126, which describes a Graphical User Interface for a Database System to represent a search in a database. Said invention presents a plurality of Venn diagrams, each one representing an intersection of at least two sets. For each generic graphic icon, the user chooses a selection of at least one region, defining a set of outgoing data, said generic graphic icons presented on the graphical user interface as modified graphical icons, each of them showing a graphic indication of the selections, and receiving, from the user, the information regarding the existing links between the modified graphic icons to represent an inclusion characteristic composed by said sets based on the sets of outgoing data and on the information links. Once the search is defined, it can be translated if required for its execution by a normal search engine. The extracted results can be quantified and classified by the interface systems for an optimum presentation to the user.
Also worthy of mention is document U.S. Pat. No. 6,041,331 which deals with a System and Method for Graphical Display and Automatic Information Extraction of multiple documents for their visualisation. The information is pulled out from a group of documents according to a series of predefined categories. The user is presented with a visual representation of the extracted information and he/she may apply one or more filters to said information in order to produce a visual representation of the filtered contents of said information.
Lastly, although with a lesser degree of relevance, document U.S. Pat. No. 6,134,564 may be cited. This document describes a Computer Program for quickly creating and altering presentations of parameterised text data objects and their associated graphical images. This invention provides simplified interactive means for naming categories or parameters associated with each text data object, assigning values to each parameter for each text data object to associate graphic images and/or audio files with each text data object, and allows the user to view a categorised and ordered list of the selected text data objects.